Predators, prey, and transient states in the assembly of spatially structured communities

Extending trait dispersion across trophic levels: Predator assemblages act as top-down filters on prey communities

Studies of community assembly typically focus on the effects of abiotic environmental filters and stabilizing competition on functional trait dispersion within single trophic levels. Predation is a well-known driver of community diversity and composition, yet the role of functionally diverse predator communities in filtering prey community traits has received less attention. We examined functionally diverse communities of predators (fishes) and prey (epifaunal crustaceans) in eelgrass (Zostera marina) beds in two northern California estuaries to evaluate the filtering effects of predator traits on community assembly and how filters acting on predators influence their ability to mediate prey community assembly. Fish traits related to bottom orientation were correlated with more clustered epifauna communities, and epifauna were generally overdispersed while fishes were clustered, suggesting prey may be pushed to disparate areas of trait space to avoid capture by benthic sit-and-wait predators. We also found correlations between the trait dispersions of predator and prey communities that strengthened after accounting for the effects of habitat filters on predator dispersion, suggesting that habitat filtering effects on predator species pools may hinder their ability to affect prey community assembly. Our results present compelling observational evidence that specific predator traits have measurable impacts on the community assembly of prey, inviting experimental tests of predator trait means on community assembly and explicit comparisons of how the relative effects of habitat filters and intraguild competition on predators impact their ability to affect prey community assembly. Integrating our understanding of traits at multiple trophic levels can help us better predict the impacts of community composition on food web dynamics as regional species pools shift with climate change and anthropogenic introductions.

Integrating the underlying structure of stochasticity into community ecology

Stochasticity is a core component of ecology, as it underlies key processes that structure and create variability in nature. Despite its fundamental importance in ecological systems, the concept is often treated as synonymous with unpredictability in community ecology, and studies tend to focus on single forms of stochasticity rather than taking a more holistic view. This has led to multiple narratives for how stochasticity mediates community dynamics. Here, we present a framework that describes how different forms of stochasticity (notably demographic and environmental stochasticity) combine to provide underlying and predictable structure in diverse communities. This framework builds on the deep ecological understanding of stochastic processes acting at individual and population levels and in modules of a few interacting species. We support our framework with a mathematical model that we use to synthesize key literature, demonstrating that stochasticity is more than simple uncertainty. Rather, stochasticity has profound and predictable effects on community dynamics that are critical for understanding how diversity is maintained. We propose next steps that ecologists might use to explore the role of stochasticity for structuring communities in theoretical and empirical systems, and thereby enhance our understanding of community dynamics.

Functional consumers regulate the effect of availability of subsidy on trophic cascades in the Yellow River Delta, China

Understanding the environmental context where heterogeneous ecological processes affect biotic interactions is a key aim of ecological research. However, mechanisms underlying spatial variation in trophic interactions linked to resource availability across ecosystem gradients remains unclear. We experimentally manipulated the interactive effects of predator fish and quantitative gradient of leaf detritus on macroinvertebrates and benthic algae. We found that non-linear changes in the strength of trophic cascades were strongly linked to the retention rates of experimental leaf detritus and also determined by predatory consumers. Retention rate of leaf detritus influenced the recruitment of predatory invertebrates and foraging preference of predators, accounting for largely the variations in shift of strengthening and weakening trophic cascades. Our results highlight the importance to identify joint processes of recruitment and foraging responses of functional consumer in understanding the impacts of both anthropogenic and natural alterations in subsidy on trophic interaction of coastal food webs.

Manipulation of habitat isolation and area implicates deterministic factors and limited neutrality in community assembly

Theory predicts deterministic and stochastic factors will contribute to community assembly in different ways: Environmental filters should regulate those species that establish in a particular area resulting in the ecological requirements of species being the primary driver of species distributions, while chance and dispersal limitation should dictate the likelihood of species reaching certain areas with the ecology of species being largely neutral. These factors are specifically relevant for understanding how the area and isolation of different habitats or islands interact to affect community composition. Our review of the literature found few experimental studies have examined the interactive effect of habitat area and isolation on community assembly, and the results of those experiments have been mixed. We manipulated the area and isolation of rock “islands” created de novo in a grassland matrix to experimentally test how deterministic and stochastic factors shape colonizing animal communities. Over 64 weeks, the experiment revealed the primacy of deterministic factors in community assembly, with habitat islands of the same size exhibiting remarkable consistency in community composition and diversity, irrespective of isolation. Nevertheless, tangible differences still existed in abundance inequality among taxa: Large, near islands had consistently higher numbers of common taxa compared to all other island types. Dispersal limitation is often assumed to be negligible at small spatial scales, but our data shows this not to be the case. Furthermore, the dispersal limitation of a subset of species has potentially complex flow‐on effects for dictating the type of deterministic factors affecting other colonizing species.

Ecosystem context and historical contingency in apex predator recoveries

Habitat loss, overexploitation, and numerous other stressors have caused global declines in apex predators. This "trophic downgrading" has generated widespread concern because of the fundamental role that apex predators can play in ecosystem functioning, disease regulation, and biodiversity maintenance. In attempts to combat declines, managers have conducted reintroductions, imposed stricter harvest regulations, and implemented protected areas. We suggest that full recovery of viable apex predator populations is currently the exception rather than the rule. We argue that, in addition to well-known considerations, such as continued exploitation and slow life histories, there are several underappreciated factors that complicate predator recoveries. These factors include three challenges. First, a priori identification of the suite of trophic interactions, such as resource limitation and competition that will influence recovery can be difficult. Second, defining and accomplishing predator recovery in the context of a dynamic ecosystem requires an appreciation of the timing of recovery, which can determine the relative density of apex predators and other predators and therefore affect competitive outcomes. Third, successful recovery programs require designing adaptive sequences of management strategies that embrace key environmental and species interactions as they emerge. Consideration of recent research on food web modules, alternative stable states, and community assembly offer important insights for predator recovery efforts and restoration ecology more generally. Foremost among these is the importance of a social-ecological perspective in facilitating a long-lasting predator restoration while avoiding unintended consequences.

Spatially Heterogeneous Perturbations Homogenize the Regulation of Insect Herbivores

Anthropogenic influences on resources and consumers can affect food web regulation, with impacts on trophic structure and ecosystem processes. Identifying how these impacts unfold is challenging because alterations to one or both resources and consumers can similarly transform community structure, especially for intermediate consumers. To date, empirical testing of perturbations on trophic regulation has been limited by the difficulty in separating the direct effect of perturbations on species composition and diversity from those unfolding indirectly via altered feeding pathways. Moreover, disentangling the independent and interactive impacts of covarying stressors that characterize human-altered systems has been an ongoing analytical challenge. We used a large-scale metacommunity experiment in grasslands to test how resource inputs, stand perturbation, and spatial factors affect regulation of insect herbivores in tritrophic grassland food webs. Using path-model comparisons, we observed significant simplification of food web regulation on insect herbivores, shifting from mixed predator-resource regulation in unaltered mainland areas to strictly resource-based regulation with landscape perturbation and fragmentation. Most changes were attributed to homogenization of plant community caused by landscape fragmentation and the deterministic influence of eutrophication that reduced among-patch beta diversity. This led to a simplified food web dominated by fewer but more abundant herbivore taxa. Our work implies that anthropogenic perturbation relating to resources and spatial isolation can transform the regulation of food web diversity, structure, and function.

Colonisation rate and adaptive foraging control the emergence of trophic cascades

Ecological communities are assembled and sustained by colonisation. At the same time, predators make foraging decisions based on the local availabilities of potential resources, which reflects colonisation. We combined field and laboratory experiments with mathematical models to demonstrate that a feedback between these two processes determines emergent patterns in community structure. Namely, our results show that prey colonisation rate determines the strength of trophic cascades - a feature of virtually all ecosystems - by prompting behavioural shifts in adaptively foraging omnivorous fish predators. Communities experiencing higher colonisation rates were characterised by higher invertebrate prey and lower producer biomasses. Consequently, fish functioned as predators when colonisation rate was high, but as herbivores when colonisation rate was low. Human land use is changing habitat connectivity worldwide. A deeper quantitative understanding of how spatial processes modify individual behaviour, and how this scales to the community level, will be required to predict ecosystem responses to these changes.

The dynamics of assembling food webs

Community assembly is central to ecology, yet ecologists have amassed little quantitative information about how food webs assemble. Theory holds that colonisation rate is a primary driver of community assembly. We present new data from a mesocosm experiment to test the hypothesis that colonisation rate also determines the assembly dynamics of food webs. By manipulating colonisation rate and measuring webs through time, we show how colonisation rate governs structural changes during assembly. Webs experiencing different colonisation rates had stable topologies despite significant species turnover, suggesting that some features of network architecture emerge early and change little through assembly. But webs experiencing low colonisation rates showed less variation in the magnitudes of trophic fluxes, and were less likely to develop coupled fast and slow resource channels--a common feature of published webs. Our results reveal that food web structure develops according to repeatable trajectories that are strongly influenced by colonisation rate.

Response of native insect communities to invasive plants

Invasive plants can disrupt a range of trophic interactions in native communities. As a novel resource they can affect the performance of native insect herbivores and their natural enemies such as parasitoids and predators, and this can lead to host shifts of these herbivores and natural enemies. Through the release of volatile compounds, and by changing the chemical complexity of the habitat, invasive plants can also affect the behavior of native insects such as herbivores, parasitoids, and pollinators. Studies that compare insects on related native and invasive plants in invaded habitats show that the abundance of insect herbivores is often lower on invasive plants, but that damage levels are similar. The impact of invasive plants on the population dynamics of resident insect species has been rarely examined, but invasive plants can influence the spatial and temporal dynamics of native insect (meta)populations and communities, ultimately leading to changes at the landscape level.

Nonlinear effects of climate on boreal rodent dynamics: mild winters do not negate high-amplitude cycles

Small rodents are key species in many ecosystems. In boreal and subarctic environments, their importance is heightened by pronounced multiannual population cycles. Alarmingly, the previously regular rodent cycles appear to be collapsing simultaneously in many areas. Climate change, particularly decreasing snow quality or quantity in winter, is hypothesized as a causal factor, but the evidence is contradictory. Reliable analysis of population dynamics and the influence of climate thereon necessitate spatially and temporally extensive data. We combined data on vole abundances and climate, collected at 33 locations throughout Finland from 1970 to 2011, to test the hypothesis that warming winters are causing a disappearance of multiannual vole cycles. We predicted that vole population dynamics exhibit geographic and temporal variation associated with variation in climate; reduced cyclicity should be observed when and where winter weather has become milder. We found that the temporal patterns in cyclicity varied between climatically different regions: a transient reduction in cycle amplitude in the coldest region, low-amplitude cycles or irregular dynamics in the climatically intermediate regions, and strengthening cyclicity in the warmest region. Our results did not support the hypothesis that mild winters are uniformly leading to irregular dynamics in boreal vole populations. Long and cold winters were neither a prerequisite for high-amplitude multiannual cycles, nor were mild winters with reduced snow cover associated with reduced winter growth rates. Population dynamics correlated more strongly with growing season than with winter conditions. Cyclicity was weakened by increasing growing season temperatures in the cold, but strengthened in the warm regions. High-amplitude multiannual vole cycles emerge in two climatic regimes: a winter-driven cycle in cold, and a summer-driven cycle in warm climates. Finally, we show that geographic climatic gradients alone may not reliably predict biological responses to climate change.

Joint estimation of habitat dynamics and species interactions: disturbance reduces co-occurrence of non-native predators with an endangered toad

1. Ecologists have long been interested in the processes that determine patterns of species occurrence and co-occurrence. Potential short-comings of many existing empirical approaches that address these questions include a reliance on patterns of occurrence at a single time point, failure to account properly for imperfect detection and treating the environment as a static variable. 2. We fit detection and non-detection data collected from repeat visits using a dynamic site occupancy model that simultaneously accounts for the temporal dynamics of a focal prey species, its predators and its habitat. Our objective was to determine how disturbance and species interactions affect the co-occurrence probabilities of an endangered toad and recently introduced non-native predators in stream breeding habitats. For this, we determined statistical support for alternative processes that could affect co-occurrence frequency in the system. 3. We collected occurrence data at stream segments in two watersheds where streams were largely ephemeral and one watershed dominated by perennial streams. Co-occurrence probabilities of toads with non-native predators were related to disturbance frequency, with low co-occurrence in the ephemeral watershed and high co-occurrence in the perennial watershed. This occurred because once predators were established at a site, they were rarely lost from the site except in cases when the site dried out. Once dry sites became suitable again, toads colonized them much more rapidly than predators, creating a period of predator-free space. 4. We attribute the dynamics to a storage effect, where toads persisting outside the stream environment during periods of drought rapidly colonized sites when they become suitable again. Our results support that even in highly connected stream networks, temporal disturbance can structure frequencies with which breeding amphibians encounter non-native predators. 5. Dynamic multi-state occupancy models are a powerful tool for rigorously examining hypotheses about inter-species and species-habitat interactions. In contrast to previous methods that infer dynamic processes based on static patterns in occupancy, the approach we took allows the dynamic processes that determine species-species and species-habitat interactions to be directly estimated.